Abstract
A general consideration of Romanticism and science may start from the premise that all romantic poetics, however they may differ from each other, are metaphors taken from science or nature. The most influential among them describes both the working of the imagination and the structure of poems with metaphors taken from organic life: the imagination, as Coleridge writes in his Biographia Literaria, “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (ch. 14: 2, p. 16), and “the rules of the imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production” (ch. 18: 2, p. 84). Goethe’s similar notion of organicism is characterized by the concepts of type, metamorphosis, polarity, and enhancement [Steigerung]. Novalis deviates from this practice by choosing his metaphors not from organic life but, as Kapitza and Mahoney have shown, from chemistry, and as I have indicated in my book Symbolismus und symbolische Logik, from combinatorial mathematics.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Neubauer, J. (1989). Nature as Construct. In: Amrine, F. (eds) Literature and Science as Modes of Expression. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2297-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2297-6_7
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